Their master's choice

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Britain surfed a wave created by Tony Blair's politics of choice.
But now, after a tough year and with an election imminent, he takes
his cues from how history will judge him. Peter Fray reports.

There's a reality TV show to suit every taste, desire or hobby
in Tony Blair's Britain. Whether wife-swapping, lovemaking,
body-sculpting and plain old home, garden and wardrobe improving -
there's a program to suit on prime-time or just after. If not, just
wait, there's one on its way.

It is, say the programmers, what the punters really want or
possibly need. Social mobility via the remote control; just sit
back and dream.

As with TV in Britain, so too with politics. In Blair's Britain,
as in Margaret Thatcher's before, choice is the mantra for the
masses. Having been let out of the cage by Thatcher in the 1980s,
aspiration roams free like some benign yet wild beast.

To criticise it, as Prince Charles did recently, is to criticise
the heart of what New Labour calls New Britain. Forget the
Windsors, meritocracy rules. Or, as Charles Clarke, then education
secretary, now Home Secretary, put it: "We can't all be born to be
king but we can all have a position where we really can aspire for
ourselves and for our families to do the very best that we possibly
can, and I want to encourage that position."

The Old Labour party gave the world the welfare state, the
cradle-to-grave system that looked after the Average Joe. New
Labour has given Joe a voice as well as a safety net. It has
allowed Joe and Josephine to stand up and demand rather than be
told to sit down and receive. In turn, hospitals and schools are
forced to compete for "clients" by delivering better services,
smarter children, shorter waiting lists. It is the Prime Minister's
fundamental pitch to Middle England, to the people who decide
elections rather than those who join parties and knock on doors
come election time.

"The relationship between state and citizen has changed," Blair
told Labour's annual party conference last September. "People have
grown up. They want to make their own life choices.

"In an opportunity society, as opposed to the old welfare state,
government does not dictate; it empowers. It makes the individual
patient, parent, law-abiding citizen, job-seeker the driver of the
system, not the state."

The politics of choice, from being able to pick what school or
hospital to attend to freeing up gambling and drinking hours, is
Blair's contribution to modern Britain. It is as Stephen Driver,
social researcher and co-author of Blair's Britain, argues,
the "key to the Blair Government". "Choice is appealing to those
voters who are not natural Labour voters or who aspire not to be
Labour voters," Driver says. "These are the parts of the electorate
that Labour won over to secure two landslide victories [in 1997 and
2001] and which Blair needs to continue to appeal to. But these
voters are increasingly sceptical of his appeal to trust him."

The idea of bringing internal competition to public services
without full-scale privatisation is what sets Blair and his
acolytes apart from their colleagues in cabinet, in Parliament and
those in the party who feel their Prime Minister is an elaborate
con, and that New Labour is a bad dream from which Labour will wake
up singing the Red Flag. He isn't and it won't.

Blair has more than a touch of the old-time preacher about him.
He is driven, earnest and, agree with him or not, largely
successful. He has redefined his party, weakening the influence of
the left and trade unions, and denied the main Conservative
opposition party sufficient oxygen to threaten him on a sustained
basis. After two terms and close to eight years in power, Blair
remains ahead in opinion polls and despite no longer being the
golden boy he once was, appears to be a shoo-in for another
stint.

Iraq cost him trust and exacted a high personal and public toll
on him and his key supporters, but it will not be terminal.
However, Blair is neither immune nor untouchable. His highly
fractious relationship with Gordon Brown, his Chancellor and most
likely successor, continues to give the Opposition some much-needed
mileage. Any credible suggestion that taxes or interest rates are
set to rise would be a godsend.

Despite recent polls predicting Blair will be returned with
another big majority in an election expected by May, the Prime
Minister and his strategists are preparing to lose seats to the
Conservatives.

This is pre-election warm-up and political logic: Blair's zenith
should have been his stunning second win in 2001 that left the
Conservatives literally gutted. It would be the greatest statement
of Blair's ethos - his belief that he talks over the party direct
to the voters - if the 2005 election resulted in another
overpowering victory. The reality is likely to be far more
mixed.

And both the Tories and Labour are expected to suffer at the
hands of Britain's third party, the Liberal-Democrats, the only
mainstream party that opposed the war in Iraq and whose main appeal
comes from being neither Her Majesty's loyal Government nor the
Opposition. But it remains difficult to see anything other than
another Labour victory.

Of course, the loss of another one or two ministers in the wake
of the resignation of the home secretary, David Blunkett, or a
full-on, poll-eve outbreak of hostilities between Blair and Brown
about policy, and the vexed question of when Blair will make good
his promise to go in a third term, could see New Labour
scrambling.

And the Tories are not short of ammunition. They say Labour is
all talk: it promised not to raise taxes, yet taxes have been
increased 66 times since Blair came to power in 1997; Blair
promised tough action on crime, yet gun crime has doubled and there
are a million violent crimes a year; Blair promised to make the
asylum system faster and firmer, and yet there are more than
250,000 failed asylum seekers still living in Britain.

These and other criticisms, such as Blair's support for the new
European Union constitution, may help harden the traditional Tory
vote and perhaps scare parts of Middle England. But will it bring
the Opposition Leader, Michael Howard, into power? The answer still
seems to be no.

Bob Worcester, chairman of the Mori polling group, believes
nothing will unravel the Prime Minister unless "Peter Mandelson
[Blair's political confidant and now Britain's European
Commissioner] and Blair get up to it in Picadilly Circus. It's that
unrealistic. If the Tories had only opposed Iraq and then maybe the
anti-war people would have gone to the Tories as a protest vote."
The veteran pollster, who carries no torch for Labour, has recently
revised his estimate of Blair's next majority, from 40-60 seats to
close to 100. It is now about 160.

Blair is a past master at neutering and stealing the Tories'
more populist policies. Most recently, he blunted the Tory idea of
giving home owners greater legal rights to defend themselves
against burglars by promising to investigate a similar move. He
used his New Year message to promise new, tougher and as-yet
unveiled policies against asylum seekers and noted that, under his
Government, there were 12,500 more police on the streets.

But the Blair Government is more than an echo of Thatcher or
sheep in wolfish Tory clothes. Judging by the main indicators, it
has delivered a sound economy. Inflation and unemployment are low,
at 1.5 per cent and 4.7 per cent respectively, and economic growth
healthy at 3.1 per cent. Compared with the average growth in Europe
of 1.8 per cent, and the economic doldrums besetting Germany and
France, the British economy is buoyant.

Pre-Thatcher, under the Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments,
Britain was seen as the sick man of Europe, its international
influence waning, its economy floundering under red tape and even
redder unions. Blair has not only learnt the lessons of
Thatcherism, but he has successfully adapted them to what he
prefers to call progressive rather than socialist politics.

Blair's Britain could not have happened without the Thatcher
revolution that dragged the economy and social policy into the late
20th century and undermined forever the power of militant trade
unions, but it is not its centre-left clone.

"If the New Right hadn't done it, some version of the New Left
would have had to," argues Driver, director of the social research
centre at Roehampton University, London. "Labour has consolidated
many of the key Thatcher reforms and, in the case of fiscal policy,
codified them.

"But it has also done some remarkably unThatcherite things, such
as commit large chunks of taxpayers' money to collective public
services like health and education. New Labour is a Labour
government. It may not always look like one, but then the rules of
government and politics - and of culture and society - have changed
across the world.

"It is no longer possible to do what Old Labour governments did
and stay in power. Who on the left believes you ought to
nationalise large sections of the economy?"

All this is nonetheless riddled with apparent contradictions for
Labour's traditional supporters. A study by the Joseph Rowntree
Foundation, an independent social policy group, shows the
Government has reduced to varying degrees pensioner, working-age
and child poverty. It is close to reaching its 1997 target of
cutting child poverty by a quarter by 2004-05 and brought
unemployment down to its lowest level in 30 years. At the same
time, the incomes of the rich are rising faster than those of any
other part of society and, despite improvements in primary school
education, large social class differences remain.

This hints at what Driver sees as the fundamental problem with
Blair's choice-based society. Sooner or later money, not
opportunity, talks. "The real problem Blair has is he is trying to
change things without privatisation," he says. "How do you improve
basic services without privatisation? I think there's a real limit
to what you can do by introducing choice into basic services
without introducing the problem that people with more money will
have greater choices.

"Blair is playing away on this issue politically. Traditional
Labour institutions will, by and large, fight him on this. Sounding
Tory has never been his problem, but he has to sell the politics of
choice to people who don't want to buy it."

Peter Kilfoyle, a former Blair minister turned arch Blair
critic, argues that choice is a chimera, especially in Britain's
poorer areas. "I think you can pare back all the grandiose rhetoric
and what he is really saying is that it is every man for himself.
It's the complete antithesis of what the Labour Party believes in,"
he says.

"I only have to look in my own constituency at how in so many
areas these people have got no choices of anything whatsoever. How
do you have a choice of a secondary school if you live in a country
town that has only got one secondary school? You don't have a
choice there - it's bollocks."

Research by the Mori group indicates that people like choice, or
the idea of it, even though they have misgivings that they will be
able to make the right one. Almost 60 per cent of those surveyed
believed that allowing patients to pick hospitals with shorter
waiting times or giving parents a wider choice of schools would
improve the quality of social services. However, a similar number
believed they would need advice and information to help them
decide.

The question then becomes: will the newly empowered consumer
trust the information provider? Ultimately, will the voters trust
Blair? According to the most recent Mori research, only one in five
British voters trusts Blair to tell the truth. It is partly a
legacy of Iraq, and partly the fact he has been in power since 1997
and many people have reason to be wary, if not openly hostile, to
his "trust-me" style of politics.

This may yet be Blair's Achilles heel, a condition not helped by
his own stated aim of staying on as Prime Minister through a third
term but not beyond. Assuming he wins the next election, he will be
dead man walking in political terms, says Peter Kilfoyle, a former
Blair minister turned arch Blair critic. "People won't wait four
years for him to go," he says.

But such political frailties are offset by two of Blair's
personality traits. He has an incredible self-belief that borders
on religious zeal and an innate guile that has so far allowed him
to outplay his opponents.

Blair continues to play beyond the political gallery, both press
and party, by showing a preparedness to make and stick by unpopular
decisions. There remains a grudging respect and acknowledgment that
he knows where he wants to take the nation. He has virtually cast
off any notion of being genuinely loved, which he aspired to in his
first term, to ultimately being right. Is this pride before a
fall?

Philip Stephens, author of the recent Tony Blair - The Price
of Leadership, argues that critics often misunderstand what
drives the Prime Minister's desire to change his party, his country
and his planet.

"If the most frequent misjudgement of him is to confuse a
disdain for traditional ideology with an absence of belief, it is
also a mistake to confuse an eagerness to be liked with an
unwillingness to make hard decisions," he writes.

"The politics of charm and the courting of popularity have been
replaced in 10 Downing Street by conviction and urgency. He knows
now that the fleeting plaudits he once craved will count little
against the judgement of history."

And where history is concerned, he will have no choice.

Blair's trouble and strife in family affairs

By Annabel Crabb

There's nothing more natural than a prime ministerial spouse
doing a bit of charity work. But when she stands to make a tidy
profit from the exercise, public approval tends to melt away, as
Cherie Blair has discovered.

The wife of the British Prime Minister has a range of
alternative identities; she is Cherie Booth when operating in her
private capacity as a QC, mother to her four children, and Mrs
Blair at No.10.

When she spoke at a Commonwealth legal conference in Melbourne
in 2003, she was Cherie Booth. When she toured the US late last
year, she appeared to be in a state of identity flux, appearing as
"Cherie Booth Blair" to deliver three speeches which reportedly
earned her $130,000.

But her decision to team up as "Cherie Blair" with the promoter
Max Markson for a string of speaking engagements in Australia next
week - from which she will reportedly earn up to $250,000 - has
generated a chill in Britain.

"I have a real problem with the wife of a prime minister lining
her own pockets by virtue of the fact that she is the prime
minister's wife, and using taxpayers' money in the process,"
Conservative MP Julie Kirkbride told the Herald.

"Who is footing the bill for security for Mrs Blair if she's on
a trip from which the Blairs gain personally?"

Blair, it is understood, will be protected by British security
staff and Australian Federal Police officers during her speaking
tour, billed as a fund-raising expedition to benefit the Children's
Cancer Institute.

Some of the event's flyers also mention Blair's recently
published book The Goldfish Bowl: Married to the Prime
Minister (a work which, despite its promising title, delivers
not so much an insight into the Blair's residency of No.10 Downing
Street as a historical account of the prime ministerial spouse's
role).

A British newspaper last weekend claimed to have obtained a
draft budget for the five-city Australian tour, and reported that
Blair was scheduled to receive about $250,000 for her efforts, with
profits distributed as a rough three-way split between herself,
Markson's company Markson Sparks! and the charity.

Markson has fiercely denied the reported figures - he says the
charity will get much more than reported - but has not ventured a
more precise alternative assessment. Downing Street has refused to
comment on Blair's trip, describing it as her own business.

Much comment in Britain has focused on the Blairs' private
finances in light of their purchase last year of a London house for
$8.7 million; it is an investment which continues to plague the
family as the property, initially listed for rental at nearly $7500
a week, is still without a tenant.

The Blairs are estimated to be spending about $30,000 a month in
mortgage payments.